Onboarding new starters – a sample process

One of the core aspects of helping people to be effective at work starts when you first hire them. The onboarding process is crucial to helping people be effective quickly and to helping them feel welcomed to the team.

Who better to own this process than management. After all, management is about achieving effective business results – so it makes sense to help people be effective as quickly as possible.

I’ve been hiring and onboarding people for years and over that time I’ve experimented with improvements to my pretty standard process. Some of these improvements have worked, some have not.

Here in this post is a sample process in different formats for you to use as you see fit.

Copy it, mash it, ignore it. It’s up to you.

There are a few goals to try and achieve when people onboard to your company (and if that word “onboard” doesn’t resonate – call it something different 🙂 ):

To help them be as effective as possible quickly.

To ensure they feel welcomed to the business and feel like they made the right choice to join your company

To learn from the process and make it better each and every time

To keep a record of the process for communicating your strategies to other managers, HR and any one else in the org that cares.

So without anymore time wasted, here is the standard process I start with in three different formats: